Around the time his novel The Pregnant Widow came out in 2010, an interviewer asked Martin Amis whether the book constituted a return to form. "What's this return shit?" he shot back. "I don't know how this will go down, but my talent seems to me to be perfectly vigorous." You can almost hear the voice, the italics, the roll-your-own rasp: part surly, part amused. A little bit more surly.

This is Amis in combat stance, the position he has occupied for as long as most of us can remember. There is no living British writer who garners as much attention as Amis; so much of it hostile; and so much of that hostility, circularly, arising from the attention itself. He pushes back.

With a new novel coming – this month's heavily embargoed Auschwitz book The Zone of Interest – the circus starts up again. Amis occupies a really peculiar position in our national life. He is the object of envy, contempt, anger, disapproval, theatrical expressions of weariness – but also of fascination. Has there in living memory been a writer whom we (by which I mean the papers, mostly) so assiduously seek out for comment – we task him to review tennis, terrorism, pornography, the state of the nation – and whom we are then so keen to denounce as worthless? In recent years his public interventions on everything from Islamist terror to population demographics have caused mini shitstorms; and critics seem to take a particular, giant-killing glee in slamming his fiction. Setting out to write a retrospective essay on his work and reputation, the implied title you find yourself reaching for is "in defence of ... "

It's as if, and in answer to some inchoate public need, we demand of Amis that he say things in public so we can all agree on what an ass he is. He has spoken in the past – surly/amused – of an "eisteddfod of hostility", as if his detractors were the excitable participants in a provincial arts festival.

Why the eisteddfod? Why him? I think it has to do with the way we have positioned him, and – to an extent – with the way he has positioned himself. He has been the press's perfect idea of a celebrity writer since forever. Interesting background? Check. The son of Kingsley Amis, he is, as he has written in these pages, "the only hereditary novelist in the canon", so, as he sees it, "it became accepted that you could say whatever you fucking well liked about me – because, so to speak, I didn't earn it". I can think of two literary biographical studies whose authors are almost palpably, Oedipally, demented by Amis-envy: one hostile; the other fawning.

Interesting private life? Check. Cult following? Check. Member of literary rat pack? Check. Headline-making sums of money? Check. But also, and especially, he plays the role of the public writer: he pronounces on big subjects in and out of his fiction. In this respect he resembles Norman Mailer, though as a literary Atlanticist Amis looks to Saul Bellow and John Updike. And he gives good quotes: he's funny and enraging. His swagger, the swerve in his literary and oratorical style towards hyperbole, that combat stance, are media catnip. We like writers to declare war, and Amis is concerned with wars and revolutions: the war between young and old, the sexual revolution, the war against shame, the war against cliche, the war against Islamism, the war against eisteddfods ...

But there are really three Amises. There's Amis the writer and Amis the private individual. And then there's Amis the public figure: the Idea of Martin Amis. That's the Amis who hogs the attention and draws the fire. The other two are, as it were, collateral damage. The cliche would be to say that these personae are inextricably intertwined, but they are not. Let's say instead that they are extricably intertwined.

There is a real, living and breathing private human being called Martin Amis, a contributor to (and occasionally, I suspect, a prisoner of) the idea of Martin Amis – which is what rampages across our national life. What do we know of him? Not as much as we think. For what it's worth, I've chaired events with him a couple of times and met him on a handful of others. I found him prickly, humorous, generous and a magnificent spooler-out of well-rehearsed sentences. Not that this is really relevant, but given the widely held, categorical and presumptuous view that Amis is a complete arsehole, one should enter a plea in favour of hesitation.

Extricable: the gossip. The facts about his life. Among the many things about Amis that we know about but that either don't matter or are none of our business are, in no particular order:

That is called occultatio, or: having your cake and eating it. But it is easy to forget – as open season is declared on the supposed man, the supposed teeth, the supposed opinions, the supposed sexism, the supposed racism, the supposed Islamophobia, the supposed arrogance, the supposed refusal to play the media's game, the supposed playing of the media's game – that he is primarily of interest because he is a writer. And he is a very good one: the possessor of a staggering – by which I mean both impressive and lopsided – talent.

It is, as he says himself, a "vigorous" talent: its special quality is its vitality of style. Looking back on his own early work once he professed himself appalled by how "crude" and "cack-handed" it was – how much craft he had yet to acquire – but "Not the writing. That was terribly alive." Quite so. Throughout Amis's career you can seek defects in characterisation or structure, or you can find him (though this is far from true of all his work, especially lately) a rather chilly writer; but even in the supposedly dud books you will find showstopping sentences and paragraphs, as many in a novel by Amis as some second-tier talents would feel pleased to have produced in a career.

In The Pregnant Widow, even the incidental fauna is given the full treatment:

"There weren't any serpents in this garden, but there were flies: in the middle distance, vague flecks of death – and then, up close, armoured survivalists with gas-mask faces. And there were silky white butterflies. And great drunken bees, throbbing orbs that seemed to carry their own electrical resonance; when they collided with something solid – tree bole, statuary, flowerpot – they twanged back and away, the negative charge repelled by the positive."

Illustration by Nick Ellwood

Here is what, when practised by Amis's friend the poet Craig Raine, gets called Martianism (an anagram of Martin Amis – meaning to describe the world as if through the eyes of an alien). Martinism. It is often captivating. It is also, at least potentially, a limitation. To take the contemporaries and near contemporaries with whom, for three or four decades now, he has been associated (AmisBarnesMcEwan, the run-on-phrase sounding like an ambitiously branded management consultancy; AmisBarnesMcEwanRushdie after a merger): you could pick out 10 sentences of Ian McEwan, a paragraph of Julian Barnes, at random and you would not necessarily be able to identify them as such. A paragraph of Amis, a sentence of Amis, always sounds like Amis.

If one version of fiction writing has the author tending towards a minimally marked, minimally rhetorical style – free indirect Flaubertian naturalism; Roland Barthes's idea of "writing degree zero" – Amis is at the other end of the scale. In his early journalism, you can sometimes hear the cadences of Clive James (another member of the old New Statesman gang) – the rhythmic bop; the slanginess; the tug towards aphorism. But James was primarily a critic and memoirist: as a novelist, that sort of style is a different decision.

"Anthony Burgess said there are two kinds of writers: A-writers and B-writers," Amis said in his 1998 Paris Review interview. "A-writers are storytellers. B-writers are users of language. And I tend to be grouped in the Bs." Prose is foremost, and "if the prose isn't there, then you're reduced to what are merely secondary interests, like story, plot, characterisation, psychological insight and form". Masters of the B-writer type to whom Amis is more or less indebted are Nabokov, Joyce and Dickens. You'd struggle to see them as hobbled.

Nevertheless, there is something approaching a received narrative of Amis's career. It goes like this, and I don't think it is all that far wrong. He came out of the gates at speed: smart and brash, grotesquely funny, saturated in the texture of the second half of the 20th century and extraordinarily clever with form. But he soon acquired his jones for seriousness. He became concerned about nuclear annihilation (Einstein's Monsters), catastrophe physics (London Fields), the irreversibility of time (Time's Arrow, The Information), Hitler's genocide (Time's Arrow), Stalin's terror (Koba the Dread, House of Meetings), Islamist terror (The Second Plane) and so on. This stuff arrived in his work, and it did not always do so to advantage. It seemed to jostle with the street-level comedy, the knockabout characterisation, the swagger of the prose. Black holes in sodomy and black holes in deep space were yoked together by the violence of his style. For many people – how can this not gall a writer as ambitious and productive as Amis? – his best novel is still Money.

The suggestion is that the subject-matter and the ambition are somehow at odds with the mode of attack, that he mistakes the nature of his own talent. Here is a social satirist in the Dickensian burlesque style and yet one who also wants to report on the world, on the universe. That he speaks about the writer's task as "a war against cliche" is indicative: war isn't the only approach to cliche (Graham Swift, for instance, has more of a co-optative way with it) but it is Amis's. He wants to make it new. And to make it new can be to make it hermetic.

There's a sense, too, in some of the later work, of the author getting further from his subject matter. When Amis wrote about the dingy bits of west London in London Fields, or 1980s New York in Money, you felt he knew them. He'd been to the Black Cross on his slumming expeditions; he'd eaten a horrorpie with Keith Talent. His larky last novel, Lionel Asbo, was subtitled "State of England". (I read the missing article as a joke: a head-shaking exclamation, with an implied ellipsis: "Look at the ... " and "Knarrmean?" rather than a solemn statement of authorial intent.) But the satire felt second-hand: a cartoon of a cartoon. You didn't feel confident – as Lionel tucks into a mega bucket of fried chicken – that Amis has set foot in a KFC in all his puff. (He has Lionel unzipping "little sachets of ketchup, mustard, sweet relish" for one: the pedantic KFC-frequenter in me notices that you don't get either of the latter two in any branch I've come across.) And forget KFC: was it hubristic or presumptuous to write about Russia – "the northern Eurasian plain" – without ever having been there? Perhaps. Again: the novelist – the writer who wants to make Russia up from scratch and has the tools to do so – is privileged over the reporter.

Also there's the old question mark over his women. When I interviewed Amis about House of Meetings I asked him about the charge levelled by some reviewers that the female protagonist Zoya was a "male fantasy figure" (the same thing could be said of Nicola in London Fields and Scheherazade in The Pregnant Widow). "All that means is that she's pretty," he responded. "Are they suggesting that there are no pretty women? Or that novelists can't pull? Or perhaps it means that book reviewers can't pull?" There, again, the combat stance.

Amis of course knows that the question is not about whether women in fiction are allowed to be attractive – that it has to do with their agency, their interiority, the sense that they are acted upon rather than acting in his fiction. But a sort-of-surly, sort-of-amused two fingers is the preferred response. Fuck you, the eisteddfod. The counterargument that he couldn't perhaps be bothered to make is that Amis is writing, and doing so effectively, about a particular sort of masculinity. Women mostly register through their effects on men.

Does it get him off the hook to say that his subject is not female interiority: that that's not his game? Up to a point. Even if that's conceded (and he might not concede it), it limits his reach as a novelist. There's no real getting around the fact that Amis writes, primarily, about men: and that his approach to masculinity is one in which women are a different tribe – sometimes feared, often longed-for, sometimes despised, frequently admired, but always other. In The Rachel Papers, right off, seduction was a matter of abstract literary enterprise: a set of rhetorical battle-plans. Men are from Mart: women are from Venus. Still, as Amis once wrote about Angus Wilson: "No writer can determine what may appeal to his imagination and it is simply philistine to arraign him for the things he happens to write about best."

That the women in his books are acted upon rather than acting is not a complaint exclusively about his women, either. The inverse mechanic of Time's Arrow is maybe only the most extreme instance in his work of cause and effect being shot. Countless Amis characters are not in control, or think they are acting and then discover they are being acted upon. His most memorable characters are collections of unruly appetites: John Self ("unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I'm always smoking another cigarette"); the whole cast of Dead Babies, guzzling booze and pills; Charles Highway with his intellectual and sexual ambition in The Rachel Papers; Richard Tull's bottomless thwarted hunger for literary acclaim in The Information. Think of Mike Hoolihan (Amis's jokily masculine female narrator) in Night Train, picking up a trail of clues to a suicide, the dispassionate investigator who discovers she's being manipulated by a dead girl; of Nicola Six, embracing her doom as the "murderee" in London Fields; of John Self, having no idea most of the way through Money that his own agent is deliberately ruining him. It does to note glancingly that a lot of his characters are victims of something that looks like an author.

A graver charge – one that bears not only on his fiction but on his pronouncements as a public man, as a writer-in-the-world – is that there is something essentially appropriative about his talent: that big subjects are being adopted to add bigness to Amis. That he never let his fine book about video games, Invasion of the Space Invaders, be republished seems to bolster this view.

The squarest blow landed by Tibor Fischer's notoriously stinky review of Yellow Dog (Footnote: not actually a review. I commissioned Fischer to fill in for a Daily Telegraph columnist who was on holiday when I was comment editor for the paper. Imagine my surprise ... ) was his claim that "one of Amis's weaknesses is that he isn't content to be a good writer, he wants to be profound; the drawback to profundity is that it's like being funny: either you are or you aren't, straining doesn't help".

Readers, in some cases, react with uneasiness at the sense that they are being asked to accord the subject matter special importance by virtue of its having happened to pass through Amis's consciousness and been rendered in his style. Even his friend Christopher Hitchens was uneasy with the apparent solipsism of Amis's line in Koba the Dread that the cries of his baby daughter "would not have been out of place in the deepest cellars of the Butyrki prison in Moscow during the Great Terror". The New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani summed up the personal asides in that book as "the narcissistic musings of a spoiled, upper-middle-class litterateur".

His writing in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks seemed problematic for a similar reason. His reaction to the destruction of the Twin Towers was to mint neologisms – it was "the worldflash of a coming future"; it was "horrorism" – and to privilege his own response to watching it on television: "species-shame". There we run up against the difficulty of dealing with the most serious subjects when you are a B-writer of the sort who doesn't know how to disappear: are you serving the events, claiming them for your own, or somehow competing with them?

Then again, in some sense all writers are B-writers. The world is the occasion for an exercise in prose, and their loyalty is to the prose, not to the world. Amis is only a very stark example.

And the account of Amis that stresses his hunger for seriousness or importance – that looks in his work for pomposity – is one that also misses his self-mockery. If you read his memoir Experience – especially if you read it expecting to find a brass-necked egomaniac – you will be startled by its self-ironising account of the young Amis, the absurd, peacocking "Osric". The run of Little Keiths in his work – avatars of everything that wishes it was six foot one and successful with women, and most grotesquely embodied in Dead Babies's person of restricted height – has been well noted. Amis isn't a Keith, but Keith is a shadow self. Hitchens, apparently, used to head letters to Martin "Dear little Keith ... "

And let's give him some credit. It probably hasn't escaped Amis's own attention that his men tend to be locked in a particularly futile and insecure male rivalry (Success and The Information most baldly, but passim). He is competitive – AS Byatt spoke of "male turkeycocking" in the long-ago row over the half-million-pound advance – but that competitiveness is one of his subjects. He's an aggressive defender of the idea of hierarchy in literature, and he's clear where he wants to be in it: "You haven't got a chance of being the best unless you think you're the best." He has said – and there's self-mockery here, too – that the only sort of review any writer wants to read is one of 100% unqualified praise. He is a male egotist, in other words – and a knowing anatomist of male egotism.

To point to a slant relationship between his subjects and his approach – between the impulse to create his own fictional worlds and the desire to make them reflect on this one – and to find it causing a grinding of gears is not to say that it renders his fiction impossible. It's precisely this slant relationship that produces the extreme originality – the shock of simultaneous estrangement and recognition – that characterises his best work. Amis has self-identified as a comic novelist, and laughter – as the cough of surprise, as the instinctive response to dissonance – is right at the base of his effects.

The approach to Auschwitz in Time's Arrow was a startling success: it did make you see the Holocaust afresh. It made you see it as an astonishing joke, a terrible joke, a (to use the cliche) killing joke. A video in fast-rewind: the chimneys of the death camp sucking in smoke and ashes and rebuilding Jews, doctors methodically helping them to their feet, packing them in trains and returning them dutifully to their villages. Here, surely, was Amis's comic imagination at full stretch – and applied to matters of the utmost seriousness.

So when we know that The Zone of Interest returns him to that territory – it has been described to me as "an office comedy set in Auschwitz" – we hold our breaths. Amis is known for (another cliche) "verbal pyrotechnics". We think: is this going to be another misfire; an exploding Catherine wheel scorching the bark off a tree; a toppled rocket screaming horizontally into the laburnums followed by the awful yelping of a dog? Or is it – and this is still abundantly possible – going to be something that lights up the sky?